For most of the last decade, producing consistently decent B2B content was itself a competitive advantage. It required people, budget and organisational discipline, and plenty of companies simply couldn't sustain it. That advantage evaporated over about nine months. Competent, generic content now costs approximately nothing, which means anything competing only on being competent is now worth approximately nothing.
What just became worthless
The reasonably-written explainer on a well-documented topic. The listicle. The 'ultimate guide' assembled from the existing top ten results. The LinkedIn post restating a widely-agreed principle. All of this used to signal that a company was serious enough to invest in marketing. It no longer signals anything, because it costs nothing to produce and everyone in your category is producing it.
What became more valuable
Everything that can't be synthesised. Original data from your own product or customer base. A named person with a track record and an argument. Specific accounts of things that went wrong. Genuine disagreement with the category consensus. These share a property: they require having done something, and no model can generate them because the underlying information doesn't exist outside your company.
- Proprietary data — numbers only you can publish
- Named humans with reputations attached to the claim
- Specific failure stories, which nobody fabricates because they're unflattering
- Positions that a reasonable person in your category could argue against
The uncomfortable implication for content teams
If your content function is structured around volume — a calendar, a target number of posts, a pipeline of briefs — that structure is now aimed at producing the exact commodity that just lost its value. The reorganisation this implies is significant: fewer pieces, more research, more time with customers, and a measurement system that stops rewarding output. Most teams will resist this because output is easy to report and insight isn't.
Where to start if you accept the argument
Cut your publishing cadence in half and spend the freed time on customer interviews. Ten proper conversations with recent buyers will give you more genuinely differentiated material than a quarter of content briefs. It's slower, it's harder to schedule, and it produces things no competitor can copy — which is the entire definition of a moat, and the only one still available.
When the cost of sounding competent falls to zero, the only remaining differentiator is having something to say that isn't already in the training data.
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